Beware the decline of Christianity

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Post by SoulBiter »

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.
OK, so when you make claims like this, you really ought to cite your sources. I have been studying the statistics of democide for 17 years and no number of that magnitude has been even hinted at in the thousands of sources that I and other researchers have sifted through.
The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)
The figure of 3,000 for the Inquisition is a revised number based on one strain of analysis. And your remarks about the Crusades are flat-out false. The Albigensian Crusade was specifically organized to wipe out Gnostic heretics in France and the range of figures that reputable historians have cited in this case go from about 100,000 to possibly 1,000,000. (Matthew White and R. J. Rummel are good [NOT PERFECT] sources for a broad, detailed perspective on these questions.)

EDIT:

I'm going to refer to a list I wrote out in another post:
I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?

The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.

To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.

What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.

This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.

So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.

But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?

If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.

And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).

I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.

Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.

So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.

QED...
I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.

I grant that you spent alot of time putting this together but to not site your sources while at the same time asking someone else to site theirs is a bit hypocritical.


Btw- this might make a good tank topic. I will be out of town for work this week so it maybe be a while before I can get back to it.
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Post by Rawedge Rim »

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.
OK, so when you make claims like this, you really ought to cite your sources. I have been studying the statistics of democide for 17 years and no number of that magnitude has been even hinted at in the thousands of sources that I and other researchers have sifted through.
The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)
The figure of 3,000 for the Inquisition is a revised number based on one strain of analysis. And your remarks about the Crusades are flat-out false. The Albigensian Crusade was specifically organized to wipe out Gnostic heretics in France and the range of figures that reputable historians have cited in this case go from about 100,000 to possibly 1,000,000. (Matthew White and R. J. Rummel are good [NOT PERFECT] sources for a broad, detailed perspective on these questions.)

EDIT:

I'm going to refer to a list I wrote out in another post:
I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?

The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.

To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.

What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.

This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.

So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.

But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?

If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.

And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).

I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.

Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.

So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.

QED...
100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?
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Post by Mighara Sovmadhi »

I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.
Um, Matthew White, R. J. Rummel, David Stannard, and David Plaisted, are the ones I've cited by name so far. I could also quote Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky while I'm at it. And many others besides.
100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?
You think the Beziers massacre was the only killing? Or that the death toll in Beziers could only have been 10,000? It might've been 20,000 or even more.

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. And in the Cautio Criminalis the author said that the witch-hunts were worse than recent wars. (I used White's material to gauge this statement: he lists, IIRC, the Peasants' War and the Knight's War in Germany (I think those were the names of the wars at the time) as ranging from 100,000 to 250,000 dead. I know the old estimate of 9,000,000 witches killed is no longer widely respected but I doubt the "revised" figures of 50,000 to 100,000 that I've seen, too. Based on the Cautio Criminalis comparison, I would guesstimate some figure in the hundreds-of-thousands range.)
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Post by Wosbald »

+JMJ+
Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:[...]

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. ...
Bellarmine is notorious for being quoted out-of-context (or even for having quotes outrightly fabricated) within works of Protestant/Modernist and anti-papal polemics. I'd be circumspect in employing Bellarmine attribution.

Here's the only quote (the details of which I've cobbled together from multiple links) which a quick googling would return for me:
"It remains to answer the objections of Luther and other heretics. Argument I, from the history of the Church at large. 'The church,' says Luther, 'from the beginning even to this time, has never burned a heretic.' Therefore, it does not seem to be the mind of the Holy Spirit that they should be burned.' I reply, this argument admirably proves, not the sentiment, but the ignorance or impudence of Luther. For as almost an infinite number were either burned or put to death, Luther either did not know it, and was therefore ignorant; or if he knew it, he is convicted of impudence and falsehood; for that heretics were often burned by the church, may be adduced from many examples."

-- Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de Controversiis, Tom. ii, Lib. III, cap. XXII, "Objections Answered," 1682 edition.
Disputationes de Controversiis is now available in english translation, so the quote should be verifiable.

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But assuming for the sake of argument that the quote is accurate, it seems to me that "infinite number" could likely refer, not to a tally of individual human lives, but to a way of saying "an infinite variety of heretics" or "all types of heretics".

Also -- though this point would not speak against the fundaments of your thesis -- Pseudo-Bellarmine is likely using the term "church" in the sense of "Christendom/Christian nations" rather than in the sense of the sphere of the Church as opposed to that of the State.

Of course, this speculation is somewhat pointless until the source of the quote is established as being Bellarmine or not.


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Post by Mighara Sovmadhi »

Thank you Wosbald. And I agree that the Protestant polemics, here, are suspect in many ways. Moreover, as the Michael Severtus(sp.?) case showcases(!), Calvinism can lead to Christian-tinged atrocities, too, re: heretics.

I will also say that, though the Inquisition gets a bad rap as the medieval Catholic Gestapo, so to speak, I know that the most up-to-date analysis does not imply this, for two reasons (of which I am aware). First, the Inquisition never had access to the kind of equipment and social structure that the Gestapo operated with and in. Second, at times the Inquisition actually acted to rein in the mob mentality in areas, leading to a reduction in oppression.

So, the fantastical death toll attributed to the Inquisition in e.g. Plaisted's essay, does not strike me as likely. And although I think a figure in the range of several hundred thousand over all areas and periods is plausible, this is a drop in the bucket of blood, so to speak, compared to many other campaigns, programs, etc. that produced mass democide.
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Post by Skyweir »

Ahhh I love the level of knowledge explored here.

Wos and Mig kudos .. and brilliant points made in a fabulously collaborate spirit. This is of even greater value than the extent of knowledge you individually possess.

It adds to your independent credibility as sources of a sound and defensible wealth of knowledge.

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I love this ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
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Post by SoulBiter »

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.
Um, Matthew White, R. J. Rummel, David Stannard, and David Plaisted, are the ones I've cited by name so far. I could also quote Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky while I'm at it. And many others besides.
100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?
You think the Beziers massacre was the only killing? Or that the death toll in Beziers could only have been 10,000? It might've been 20,000 or even more.

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. And in the Cautio Criminalis the author said that the witch-hunts were worse than recent wars. (I used White's material to gauge this statement: he lists, IIRC, the Peasants' War and the Knight's War in Germany (I think those were the names of the wars at the time) as ranging from 100,000 to 250,000 dead. I know the old estimate of 9,000,000 witches killed is no longer widely respected but I doubt the "revised" figures of 50,000 to 100,000 that I've seen, too. Based on the Cautio Criminalis comparison, I would guesstimate some figure in the hundreds-of-thousands range.)
I did go out and do some reading based on some of the information you provided. But you are still conflating a leader during a war or mass killing that was supposedly a Christian with the deaths of a war as if the war was about Christianity rather than some other secular reason.

Example. The Kuomintang Civil war was politically motivated not religiously motivated. There is no reason that I could find that would indicate that this civil war was because Jesus told them to.

Woodrow Wilson was a Christian. That doesn't mean that WW1 was a Christian war/religious war.

As far as how I got to the 270 million.

https://www.politicalislam.com/tears-of-jihad/

This article goes over the deaths by region and at the bottom says specifically "This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad."

https://www.americanthinker.com/article ... story.html

Robert Spencer wrote a book "the History of Jihad" where he details the record of that mass slaughter of 270 Million people by Jihad.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... d_in_Islam
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Post by Rawedge Rim »

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.
Um, Matthew White, R. J. Rummel, David Stannard, and David Plaisted, are the ones I've cited by name so far. I could also quote Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky while I'm at it. And many others besides.
100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?
You think the Beziers massacre was the only killing? Or that the death toll in Beziers could only have been 10,000? It might've been 20,000 or even more.

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. And in the Cautio Criminalis the author said that the witch-hunts were worse than recent wars. (I used White's material to gauge this statement: he lists, IIRC, the Peasants' War and the Knight's War in Germany (I think those were the names of the wars at the time) as ranging from 100,000 to 250,000 dead. I know the old estimate of 9,000,000 witches killed is no longer widely respected but I doubt the "revised" figures of 50,000 to 100,000 that I've seen, too. Based on the Cautio Criminalis comparison, I would guesstimate some figure in the hundreds-of-thousands range.)
You think the Beziers massacre was the only killing? Or that the death toll in Beziers could only have been 10,000? It might've been 20,000 or even more.
or it could have been 2000 or less.

Not terribly uncommon to exagerate how many were overcome to bolster ones reputation.
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Post by Vraith »

How about this:

Did the founding of Islam make the Middle East MORE violent than it was before:

No.

Did the founding of Christianity make the region LESS violent:

No.

Once they became dominant in politics, did Islam or Christianity increase war/religious violence/political violence?

Yes, Both did.
For AT LEAST 1600 fucking years.

When does religious ideology STOP causing trouble?

When you take away their damn power/influence.

The ONLY way someone can "USE" religion to do evil is WHEN and BECAUSE the religious LEADERS have turned the congregants into followers/fanatics/BELIEVERS who can JUSTIFY their attacks as righteous/required...and be accused if they don't fight, and forgiven if they do but are wrong.

AND---for those who think Islam is more kill-joyous....
You could start with the activities of the Orthodox everywhere east of Switzerland-ish, and Catholics and every other Xtian group in pretty much ALL of the Americas. [[does anywhere south of Texas even exist for you people?]] There are other world places, too.
And you don't even have to look at history...a lot of this shit is going on RiGHT NOW.


P.S. Robert fucking Spencer? WTF?
Why not go D'Nasty D'Slime while you are at it?
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Post by Cail »

Vraith wrote:And you don't even have to look at history...a lot of this shit is going on RiGHT NOW.
Care to elaborate? I'm pretty sure the catholic church isn't behind any sort of slaughter anywhere in the world at the moment. Hell, the church has come out against strongmen like Maduro.
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Post by SoulBiter »

Vraith wrote:


P.S. Robert fucking Spencer? WTF?
Why not go D'Nasty D'Slime while you are at it?

"Oh crap Vraith dropped the F bomb and told me my source is no good. Guess I should go out and find some things Vraith published so I know my source is accurate." Of course I tried to Google Vraith/Islam and I got nuthin.
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Post by Vraith »

SoulBiter wrote:
"Oh crap Vraith dropped the F bomb and told me my source is no good. Guess I should go out and find some things Vraith published so I know my source is accurate." Of course I tried to Google Vraith/Islam and I got nuthin.
Heh...that's actually pretty funny.

But Spencer still is an asshole often, wrong usually, biased always.

Cail, I wasn't particularly talking about Catholics there. And at least they're against the Philippines monster.

Church is still protecting pedophiles, though.

And look at Brazil. Don't think the Church has taken an official position...but "good" Catholics and Evangelicals are in a vile mood with nasty plans, and the guy in charges is a Catholic who thinks the problem with the decades of regime rule was that they didn't kill enough people after torturing them.

Look at Putin's good Orthodox bullies.
Hell, even Buddhists are engaged in slaughtering people over race/religion.
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Post by Cail »

Vraith wrote:Cail, I wasn't particularly talking about Catholics there. And at least they're against the Philippines monster.
Fair enough.
Vraith wrote:Church is still protecting pedophiles, though.
Absolutely, and I've been a very vocal critic of that. That, as well as a few other issues, is why I'm no longer a practicing catholic.
Vraith wrote:And look at Brazil. Don't think the Church has taken an official position...but "good" Catholics and Evangelicals are in a vile mood with nasty plans, and the guy in charges is a Catholic who thinks the problem with the decades of regime rule was that they didn't kill enough people after torturing them.
And here we'll part ways. Brazil is an utterly bizarre case study. Their theological shift is to evangelical rather than catholic christianity. And those evangelicals are weird. There's a coming disaster there that's going to end up in a Balkan-like theological purge, and the evangelicals are going to be on the wrong side of it. When that happens, it'll absolutely be christian extremism and violence. But man, it's just weird what's happening there.
Vraith wrote:Look at Putin's good Orthodox bullies.
True, but religion and Russia have always had that sort of arrangement, even during the Soviet regime.
Vraith wrote:Hell, even Buddhists are engaged in slaughtering people over race/religion.
Something that always takes people by surprise.
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Post by Skyweir »

😬 Balkan like theological purge 😔
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Post by Rawedge Rim »

Vraith wrote:
SoulBiter wrote:
"Oh crap Vraith dropped the F bomb and told me my source is no good. Guess I should go out and find some things Vraith published so I know my source is accurate." Of course I tried to Google Vraith/Islam and I got nuthin.
Heh...that's actually pretty funny.

But Spencer still is an asshole often, wrong usually, biased always.

Cail, I wasn't particularly talking about Catholics there. And at least they're against the Philippines monster.

Church is still protecting pedophiles, though.

And look at Brazil. Don't think the Church has taken an official position...but "good" Catholics and Evangelicals are in a vile mood with nasty plans, and the guy in charges is a Catholic who thinks the problem with the decades of regime rule was that they didn't kill enough people after torturing them.

Look at Putin's good Orthodox bullies.
Hell, even Buddhists are engaged in slaughtering people over race/religion.
So someone who is nominally of a religion essentially makes anything that person espouses or does automatically a religious thing? Really? So a bank robber who is culturally christian is robbing a bank for the greater glory of God?
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Post by Rawedge Rim »

Cail wrote:
Vraith wrote:Cail, I wasn't particularly talking about Catholics there. And at least they're against the Philippines monster.
Fair enough.
Vraith wrote:Church is still protecting pedophiles, though.
Absolutely, and I've been a very vocal critic of that. That, as well as a few other issues, is why I'm no longer a practicing catholic.
Vraith wrote:And look at Brazil. Don't think the Church has taken an official position...but "good" Catholics and Evangelicals are in a vile mood with nasty plans, and the guy in charges is a Catholic who thinks the problem with the decades of regime rule was that they didn't kill enough people after torturing them.
And here we'll part ways. Brazil is an utterly bizarre case study. Their theological shift is to evangelical rather than catholic christianity. And those evangelicals are weird. There's a coming disaster there that's going to end up in a Balkan-like theological purge, and the evangelicals are going to be on the wrong side of it. When that happens, it'll absolutely be christian extremism and violence. But man, it's just weird what's happening there.
Vraith wrote:Look at Putin's good Orthodox bullies.
True, but religion and Russia have always had that sort of arrangement, even during the Soviet regime.
Vraith wrote:Hell, even Buddhists are engaged in slaughtering people over race/religion.
Something that always takes people by surprise.
Since about 2002 where is the wholesale protection of pedophiles and those engaged in sexual abuse been happening in the Church?

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Post by Skyweir »

1. No empirical data exists that suggests that Catholic clerics sexually abuse minors at a level higher than clerics from other religious traditions or from other groups of men who have ready access and power over children (e.g., school teachers, coaches).
You realise that this doesnt exonerate the church .. its not an assuring benchmark for your point.

But this IS your point
The incidents of clerical abuse in recent years (i.e., since 2002) are down to a trickle. Many of the newer abuse cases since 2002 have been perpetrated by visiting international priests here on vacation or sabbatical who have not gone through the extensive training and screening that American clerics now go through
But what this tells me is that US Catholicism is more proactive than the Catholic Church worldwide. It tells me that Catholicism generally are not proactive in their efforts to stamp out child abuse by clerics. This tells me that the problem originated and is systemic to Catholicism at its core or roots or source.

Why would International visiting clerics NOT have received the training that the US Catholic Church mandates for their clerics?

IF Catholicism were genuine proponents of the wellbeing of children .. IF they were committed to safeguarding Catholic children and youth from cleric abuse ... WHY is the church as a whole taking action to END it.

Kudos to the US Catholicism absolutely.. they are leading with the right foot .. but Catholicism as a whole are clearly not stepping up.

That is not a good look or an assurance that all is well.

However, these issues are indeed issues of systemic abuse that is seen in all organised religion.

Thats an even bigger issue .. I wonder if sexual abuses are also common also to Islamic and Buddhist clerics? That would be an interesting comparison or study.

Down under our royal commission addressed institutional child sex abuse issues across the board, not just religious institutions but all TOR institutions.
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Post by Orlion »

With the currently revealed scandals of the Southern Baptist and Mormon Churches making the news, SB is somewhat right. I imagine that all the sects of Christianity have serious and hidden sexual assault problems.

So why should we beware the decline of Christianity? It destroys institutions that predators have taken advantage of for years, and any good they do tend to be waaaay overstated.
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Post by Skyweir »

Agreed.

Cos Im lazy ... the thing for me is the institutional nature of these abuses.

They are so very common to institutions like religion, orphanages .. bodies where a sexual predator can be concealed, protected, to enable him access to victims.

Such instructions are grain silos of targets, easy to identify, easy to target, easy to access.

But above all a paradigm within which guilt, behavioural controls are built into belief systems and readily used by predators to silence resistance, and reporting.

Furthermore, religious paradigms, that promote sexual restraint always result in sexually unsatisfied, frustrated and fraught individuals.

Religions and the like are, in these ways a haven for sexual predators.

That's the tragedy.

The only way to combat such actions effectively is for wholesale institutional reform, from dogma and doctrine to structural processes and practices. imv anyway.
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